“It’s just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says.”

The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer-the responses of our Father to our requests-our confidence in God’s power spills over into other areas of our life.

In one way or another, it is a common mistake to think transformation is all in the will. And it isn’t! It’s in the mind – how we think, what occupies our minds, and so forth. It’s in our feelings. It’s in our body.

Relations between parents and children and siblings and mates. This is not external. We can’t separate them.

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, & loneliness.

We don’t have to be brilliant.

Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.

Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.

Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so.

You really can’t justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.

What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.

Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.

If we do not make formation in Christ the priority, then we’re just going to keep on producing Christians that are indistinguishable in their character from many non-Christians.

We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.

Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.

We’re not here to prove we’re right; we’re here to help people.

It’s not so much that the church has a mission, it’s that the mission of God has a church.

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice.

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn’t require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.

Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.

And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting.

The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible.

In the time of Mrs Thatcher the church, to give it its due, spoke out and was an enemy of the Conservative government.